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Snow was stricken for a moment, then tore her eyes from Sigrid as though she had been caught staring through a shop window full of cakes, furiously tying her net with shivering fingers. Sigrid’s face became soft in all the places it had been hard. Her cheeks melted into a rough affection.
“Love, I’ve never been anyone’s mother; I don’t know how to talk to young or old. But don’t stop smiling just because I flap my mouth and say something that’s not dressed around the edges like a lace tablecloth. Thicken up and we’ll get along fine.”
They were quiet together for a while, listening to the creak and rock of the ships in port, the tightening of the wet ropes that tied them to the pier. Gulls cackled in their witch-reedy voices, swooping into the shallows for fat pink fish. Snow’s silvery hair was dark with damp, curling against her dress. At last, Sigrid began to speak again, neither pausing nor slowing in her work as she talked.
“As to the great City, I did go, far to the south, out of the white waste-lands, across a scrub desert where there was no water, and through valleys where wine grapes grew big as plums. The dog-men never seemed to tire, and their red hoods kept out all manner of storm and sun-blisters, where I had only my little shift and a ragged old fur cloak…”
I WAS SOON QUITE FRIENDLY WITH THE BROTHERS—who, as it turned out, were literally brothers as well as fellow monks. They talked often of home, and of the other members of their litter who farmed their fields in peace and thought nothing of theology. Balthazar had the quickest tongue, often completing our sentences, as though he was impatient to hear the ends of them. Bartholomew was the most devout and kind; he shepherded me like a favorite lamb, teaching me from The Book of the Bough and The Book of Carrion (though never the meaning of the strange proverb uttered at the old home-table), though he welcomed me to choose from any of the Towers once we arrived—the variety of religion laid out before me would be as a table groaning with feast foods, he promised. Bags was our jester—he tickled me and taught me to wrestle, nipping me playfully if I let down my guard. It was not long before they were the only stars in my little sky.
The four of us kept to the roads, wherever they wound, and had food when it was plentiful—grapes and apples and occasionally soft cheese from a passing cart, but never meat, of course. The Cynocephaloi assured me that they were excellent hunters, with strong, lean human legs and jaws that could snap a bird out of the air before the song died in its warbling throat, but they would never do so. It was with terrible sadness that Bags brought me a skinny hare one evening when the desert spread out around us like a fallen dress, embroidered with sagebrush and dusty pebbles. The poor creature had dropped dead of the heat; Bags did not want to waste the meat, and I was famished. I had grown up devouring fox haunch and seal fat; the desert was unkind to my young limbs. With tears pooling in his yellow eyes, he laid the rabbit in my lap and closed its eyes as though the beast had been his brother.
“Death,” he whispered, his throat squeezing out words like blood from a deep wound. “We have seen so much death on this pilgrimage, death common as coats hung up in a hall. Four of us went out from the Chrysanthemum Tower, and four of us return—but not the same four! Do the gods mock us with numbers, tossing them at our hearts like jester’s balls? Do you know where we went, where we had gone before we came to your village? What our mission was? Al-a-Nur is the City of Light, yes, oh, yes, and the moon on her dozen towers is like water on my tongue after years of thirst! But she asks so much of us, so much is required to keep that light burning gold and blue!” He put his shaggy head in his hands, his sobs warped by the shape of his snout; the sound of his snorting, snarling grief was terrible to hear. “I can still smell his blood, his blood on my hands!”
I put aside the hare and tried to comfort him—Bags, who was always cheerful and full of jokes my mother would have whipped me for repeating, Bags, who had become my favorite of all the brothers, wept in my arms like an orphaned child. I could see the sullen fireflies of his brothers’ eyes gleaming some feet away, but I did not think they would come near. The Book of the Bough said: Grief is a private sacrament. Give it not to others as though it were a gift. He should not have wept in my lap at all—his brothers would not shame him by witnessing his lapse.
Bags looked up into my eyes and bit his tears into pieces. “Everything that was done was necessary, little sister, so that the City might live. But I have tasted a yielding throat in my jaws, and I cannot tell, I cannot tell: If one sins in order to preserve virtue—is this still sin? I am sorry, girl, you are not one of us, you will not be stained by my sorrow, you cannot be polluted by it. Let me give my grief to you, who are innocent of all these necessities, clean of all darkness. Let me tell you what my brothers and I did in the name of Al-a-Nur, the Anointed City. Let me tell you of the fourth whose place you hold…”
WHAT BARTHOLOMEW TOLD YOU WAS TRUE, ABOUT Ragnhild the Black, who called herself Papess five centuries ago and was slain by Ghyfran the Selfless. We know the tale better than any, for its continuation lay with us, when we set out from the Salmon Gate—the Gate that calls us home from our first steps into the wild, which re minds us of the river that gave us life, and to which we must return when our muzzles have grown bare.
The Caliphate, now the Fourth Caliphate, has always envied our autonomy, and hated the scrap of parchment with the hoofprint of the First Caliph stamped firmly on its cracked surface, assuring our freedom unto the end of days. Our City is rich beyond the dreams of royal bursars, and we are not tithed, we are not conscripted, we are beholden to no earthly law. After the death of Ragnhild, we had hoped that the time of their interference was finished, that their lesson had been etched deeply enough in blood that no children of our children would ever fear another apostasy.
It was etched to the depth, it would seem, of five hundred years, and no more.
After the death of Ghyfran XII—Ghyfran has become a favorite name of the Papess line, though the wolf of my heart mourns the loss, stillborn, of a long line of clear-eyed priestesses called Cveti—our current Blessed Papess, Yashna the Wise, was confirmed with no great controversy and all due ceremony. The Papal Tower gleamed in its deep hues as always, and its silver glittered as it had the day the nails first tasted the wood. There was no issue of succession. She was of the Tower of the Dead, which has given us many solemn and temperate Papesses. They are suited to it; the dead give nothing so much and so well as perspective. Yet the Caliphate chose this barely noticeable interregnum to interfere a second time, and under the Rose Dome of Shadukiam, the Apostate was born again like a black-mouthed calf.
And worse, she took the name of her predecessor—once more there was a Ragnhild with a diadem on her brow. She had sent men to retrieve the golden manacles that held the first false Papess to the earth between cities, left there as a monument to remind the Caliphate that Al-a-Nur was never again to be superseded by a filthy banking metropolis. It was said that the new Ragnhild wore them day and night, the broken chains hanging delicately from her slender wrists, that ancient gold glowering against her skin. It was said that her hair was precisely that shade of gold, that her eyes were so black that they seemed to have no pupils. It was said that she would not even call herself Ragnhild II, but believed herself to be that murdered Papess reborn, and ever wore the deep violet gown in which those unfortunate bones had finally been interred. Its grave-tatters showed her ghost-pale skin in many places, an indecency no true Papess of the Tower would have allowed.
One late evening last summer, when the blue of the sky was deeper than any sea, my brothers and I were called from the singing blossoms of the Chrysanthemum Tower to an audience with Yashna. We went, I and my three brothers—for Barnabas was the fourth of our number who stood before Yashna and heard her crow-song voice. His fur was perfectly black, without the patches of brown Bartholomew inherited from our strong-hipped mother. He was the strongest of us, and the youngest.
The Papal presence, in sim
ple gray robes and unadorned diadem, soothed the image of the wraith-Papess from our troubled hearts. She is not a young woman, our Mother Yashna; her deep brown skin is folded and creased as a beloved book. When she reached out her hand to touch our bent and reverent heads, her palm was warm and dry as a desert stone after twilight has fallen.
“My sons, listen well to me, for our City is once again besieged. I am not a Ghyfran”—at this she smiled a weary smile that turned up the corners of her mouth like the horns of the moon—“I am not even a Cveti. There is nothing in my body to give to Al-a-Nur. I am a crone; I accept this. I cannot lead an army against Shadukiam, and even if I could ride at its head, we have been so long at peace that I fear the Draghi are not what they were. They train and pray and know nothing of true war. No, this time we cannot simply crush the Black Papess under the weight of our Towers. It is a time for stealth and for cunning—and these things I can give with both hands. I have chosen you because you will not be suspected; the Scarlet Hoods have ever prohibited violence of any kind, and no one would think to question your tranquil spirits. Nevertheless, I must ask you to break your vows, as immaculate Cveti once did, in service of the lifeblood of the Twelve Towers. I am sending you from the river and familiar waters; I am sending you from the sixteen-pointed chrysanthemum. You must go east, and kill the Black Papess.”
Oh, sister, I would like to tell you we were shocked, that we agreed only out of duty—but the truth is that words such as “kill” had little meaning for us who had grown up through the cycles of the opening and closing of flowers, who had never eaten animal flesh or struck another creature in anger. We agreed because it was Yashna who asked it, we agreed because it was Yashna who told us we would be forgiven, because we wanted to wear the holy, secret name of Cveti sewn into our chests, because we wanted to be the saviors of our City, which was the deepest heart of our hearts. We thought nothing of Ragnhild, and nothing of the task. We eagerly swore ourselves, and kissed her withered hand, which smelled so sweetly of sandalwood and rustling scrolls. There was no shadow of guilt in us as we departed, as we heard the soprano echo of the Salmon Gate closing behind us.
It was not so far as we had imagined from Al-a-Nur to Shadukiam—it seems, when you rest in the arms of the Dreaming City, that all things outside her walls belong to another universe, impossible to reach by the mere motion of one foot before the other.
The land between the two cities is pleasant.
How we joked and bounded across those well-tilled fields! How we gorged ourselves on wild strawberries and oranges like little flames flashing in the morning fog! Barnabas especially reveled in the open spaces, cavorting ahead of us on his quick, flat feet. “Come on!” he cried. “There is no reason not to enjoy ourselves along the way, even if the task ahead is dreary and dire. The Bough says: Heed not the dark before, behind, and beside; dwell always in the light of the open heart. And the blueberries are so sweet on the road at first light!” Bartholomew was his usual self, staring fretfully at the night stars. Balthazar allowed Barnabas to cheer him, and the two played and wrestled together beside our nightly fires.
How cordially we were received at the sun-dappled wall of Shadukiam! How brightly her diamond turrets glittered against the great wicker dome that arches over the city, alive with a thick latticework of roses trailing over the slick surface, obscenely red dotted with the most delicate of pinks and whites. The guards let us enter without question, and our appointment with the Papess (it was terribly difficult to bite off all our accustomed prefixes, not to call her Black or False or Apostate—but we wrangled our words into a genial array) was arranged smoothly and with great courtesy. Of course, they beamed. The Papess welcomes all her sons and daughters to her bosom, they assured us. She yearns to bring her family together under the Rose Dome and heal the breaches between them, they said. Her only concern is for their souls. They bowed and scraped.
How easy it was to hate her, little sister.
We needed to smuggle no weapons into her vaulted hall; our daggers were borne in plain view, the sharp teeth of our hunter heritage which had known no flesh but that of apples and peaches. It seemed only a moment cavorting through orchards and we were here, ushered into her private antechamber, kneeling before her strange throne, which seemed to be made of the same roses that covered the city dome—yet they were alive, and writhed against her body with lascivious familiarity.
Her face was obscured by her hair as we knelt—she did not greet us or ask us to rise—the long white-gold length of it falling over her cheeks like a nun’s veil. On her wrists were the golden manacles, the chains idly brushing her bared knees; the famous violet gown showed much of her pale body, the low rim of her right breast was bare, patches of her hips and belly gleamed balefully from the ancient fabric.
I wonder, sister, if it was easier because she looked so precisely like the ghoul we had been warned of—if she had appeared without those oft-rumored accoutrements, might we have been moved by that beauty, might we have hesitated? But she was the very image of herself, unmistakable and pure.
“Welcome home, O errant sons,” she said, her voice deep and cloying as a many-storied honeycomb. She did not lift her head. “The house is ever strengthened when all its children return to its hearth. It warms me to receive you.”
“We are honored, Mother.” Barnabas spat the honorific at her, the taste of it surely bitter as lime leaves in his mouth. “Yashna has sent us with missives of peace—”
She raised her eyes suddenly, their black lights flaring like sparks from an ancient anvil. “Yashna has sent you to kill me. To rid your pestilential city of an inconvenient woman. If my attendants are fools leaping to the hope that Al-a-Nur will accept us, do not make the mistake of looking for me to leap with them. I am Ragnhild—I have felt the press of Al-a-Nur’s hand before.”
